Ray of darkness?

Following on from the ejaculations of team stupid in the video link I posted from the 700 club, I thought it would be a good idea to point out the scientific and logical errors that these particular Christians are pushing out as "obvious truth" to their followers.

There were two main arguments made during the interview,

• How did sex evolve, or in Rays simple mind, when the first dog evolved where did the female dog come from?
  
• You can't have a painting without a painter (etc.) and you can't get something from nothing.
  

When we look at the first point we can see the working of a seriously confused (or seriously devious) mind; let's be charitable and assume Ray is just confused, what he hasn't realised is that individuals don't evolve, populations do. Evolution does not work by dogs giving birth to cats or apes to people, that would be a plainly stupid thing to believe; change is much more gradual than this. In the case of sexual reproduction, i.e. having a male and female (notice Ray assumes the Male evolved first) that trait evolved way, way back in the mists of time before there were mammals, reptiles or even fish; hundreds if not thousands of millions of years ago, probably from something like a hermaphrodite worm in the pre-Cambrian, in fact some animals can reproduce this way today so we don't have to invent or imagine anything, some reptiles for example use parthenogenesis sporadically when conditions demand it . For simple animals back in the pre-Cambrian the gender difference would be quite small although even in humans the actual chemical differences between genders is miniscule, mainly switches that turn features on or off. The genetic advantage of sexual reproduction would be great for the first populations of animals to start to take advantage of it, so, by the time fish evolved we already had males and females (as seen in the fossil record) existing in such populations. Fish branched into amphibians and reptiles and all this time sexual reproduction was going on between males and females within those populations; reptiles branched into mammals and so on to the current day.

The second point Ray makes shows a hopelessly simplistic view of nature, he points to human artefacts, i.e. paintings, buildings, cars etc. things which were obviously made by people, he then extends this (obvious) rule of thumb to everything in the universe, this is a complete non-sequitur, we can show this is wrong simply by pointing to one complex thing that is not created by an intelligent designer, for example a snowflake or a rainbow. He then goes on to commit a bifurcation fallacy by assuming that there are only two possibilities, i.e. nothing created something or God created something, this neglects the possibility that the universe has always existed. To use human artefacts as examples is simply disingenuous and Ray unwittingly hoists himself by his own petard and any rational person will ask the question, if something cannot be created from nothing then who created Yahweh?

The simple fact is that we don't know where the universe came from or if it has always existed, there are physicists working on various hypothesis, indeed the LHC in part is helping to answer some of these questions, it is not even clear for example that a vacuum is even stable and matter and energy seems to pop into existence all over the place. Once we have a universe though, the path to get to homo-sapiens are more or less known; the theory of evolution explains how we get from simple forms to more complex forms not where the universe comes from so in this regard Mr Comfort adds a straw man fallacy to his already impressive list of errors.